I know a lot of Wii-U owners have always wanted to be able to use a USB port for a hard drive to backup and load their favorite games or homebrew. For quite a while we have only been able to use the SD card to load homebrew and backups on the Wii-U, which is fine since you can a get big SD cards pretty cheap these days, but now USB loading is possible!!
Thanks to the Brazillian team and everyone in the scene we can now use the USB port for super big HDD or even USB pen drives to store all of our favorite games and homebrews. Below is the FAQ about what works and what doesn’t work and how to do it yourself.
FAQ:
- If you want to install on HDD, you need to format your HDD to WiiU format. Attention it will DELETE everything on that drive. DO NOT USE THE DRIVE YOU USE FOR vWII!
- You can use any USB drive, Hard Drive or Pen Drive. Some Hard Drives will require external power or a Y Cable
- You might want to turn HDD sleep mode OFF before installing game to USB.
- The downloaded games need to be the region of your Wii U. You can install game from another region but it will not launch.
- The games will be playable online!
- You can install as many games as you want on your system as long as you have enough space, but only one at a time, because of the folder limitation.
- Already purchased DLC are working. You can purchase new DLC too.
- You can’t use non legit DLC. Use Loadiine with DLC support for that.
- You can update the game (remove the server filters or use NNUPatcher before launching the game) or use WUP installer to install manually.
- You can transfer games installed to you Hard drive to your internal storage and it will run fine
- You can install games to internal storage without installing to USB
- If you have an existing savegame/DLC/Update for your game on your internal storage, move it to you USB before installing the game to USB or you’ll lose your savegame!
- To install your Loadiine save into the console, use Saviine homebrew. Guide available here, or a youtube video tutorial here.
- NUS downloads DO NOT contain the tik file, you need to extract the ticket from the WUD file.
- You can’t dump the ticket from your console, you can’t dump a game is WUD format. stop asking
- DO NOT ASK HOW TO MAKE OR DUMP A WUD, it’s NOT POSSIBLE. release group are releasing games WHEN THEY DECIDE. That’s all.
- if the game is not on that site, or is present but “nuke”, it means the WUD does not exist for this game. No need to search for tickets.
- You can install ONLY disc based games. eShop version can’t be installed because there’s no WUD version of them.
- You CANNOT use your loadiine ready games with this method
- You cannot brick your WiiU with this method, as long as you try games and updates. DO NOT TRY TO INSTALL ANYTHING ELSE (like system titles) OR YOU WILL BRICK.
- Don’t install games you bought on eShop with this method. (unknown what would happen, just be safe and don’t mess your tickets already installed officially)
How to do:
- Get the game from NUS, do not decrypt. Be sure it’s the same region than your console!
you can use:
– JNUSTool with “-dlEncrypted” command, (Recommended program !!!)
– or NUSGrabber,
– or NewNUSGrabberDO NOT USE :
Uwizard (wrong filename),
or
NUS Grabber GUI (it’s outdated!), - put the game files (.app, .h3, etc.) on your SD card, in SD:/Install/ folder
- get the ticket for your game (extracted from a WUD file). Be sure it’s the same region than your console!
Note: you don’t need ALL the rar files to extract the full 25GB wud. Only the first .rar or .r01 file is enough to extract an incomplete wud and get the ticket. - Edit the ticket (title.tik located in folder sys/02/)
with this tool : https://gbatemp.net/threads/release-wii-u-ticket-modifier.445553/
or manually : here (not an exact method, trial and error!). - be sure your modified ticket is named “title.tik” if not, rename it.
- put the modified title.tik in the SD:/Install/ folder too.
- Put SD card into Wii U
- Plug in your WiiU Hard drive to your Wii U (if you want to install to USB)
- Eject any inserted game disc
- Launch the homebrew launcher
- Launch the modified wup installer (this WUP installer will not let you install system titles, so you can’t brick !)
- Press X button to install to HDD, or press A to install to internal memory.
- let the game install. You will see an incorrect % progress (such as 300% or more depending on the game) don’t worry and let it finish.
- When the install ends you will be rebooted back into the homebrew launcher, exit it and your games will be installed!
- delete ALL the files located on your SD:/install/ folder. You can now install another game.
Not responsible if your Wii U bricks
All credit for this method goes to Brazilian team, King Cerelepe for testing